PED3119B-MPacitto-Wiki - Week 9 - March 15th to March 21st, 2010

My Thoughts on Literacy is Not Enough reading

Some interesting statistics there, I guess that's where many of the student multimedia presentations came from. I hadn't had time to read it until now.
I'm in agreeance with Jukes for the most part. Higher order thinking skills, critical thinking skills, are paramount to being able to discriminate good information from bad. And boy oh boy, a lot of those exabytes of data on the Internet are bad or useless.
I am wondering where we're going to encounter barriers. As teachers we're hired and mandated to follow the curriculum, though it's fairly open as to how we follow it. Yet, taking my first practicum department as an example, they were pretty clear that you had to have written tests and exams. How much resistance are we looking at here?
I am loving the differentiated instruction materials I picked up in other courses, because they apply so well to infusing technology and 21st century fluency skills into the classroom.

My Thoughts on Interactive Whiteboards

I'm still not sold on the interactive whiteboard business. Yes, they can do some cool things. I'm not fully versed in the economics of the business either, but these seem like really expensive tools for something that is only slightly more powerful than Microsoft PowerPoint (based on what those videos showed me). The whole steadily revealing image thing is neat in a gimmicky way but I don't see how it applies to an educational purpose. If it does, how does this $1000+ piece of hardware do it better than something cheaper or free like Prezi or PowerPoint?
That brings me to another point. In years, we will finally have spent lots of money and have these interactive whiteboards in every class. And then what? They'll no doubt go the way of the overhead. Old, out of place in the class, annoying to use.
I am okay with having projectors and laptops in the class. The teacher in the second video was quite correct: having a live image on the board is definitely an advantage and expands what you can do, especially with a laptop attached to it. I just stop there. Having a live image on the board through a Smartboard is not an obviously beneficial.
According to Smart Technologies, a whiteboard is going to cost you about about $1300 per class. Mobile smartboards would save some money.
But how is that compared to, say, installing and rigging Nintendo products into the class? Or clickers? I really need to stop bringing up Nintendo, sorry, however:
$220 for a Wii system, one wiimote. $50 for each additional wiimote. This is well known technology that many people use. Nintendo has recently suggested getting into educational settings. A Nintendo DS Lite costs $140. That's a Wii and seven DS systems per class, for the cost of each Smartboard. The flaw, of course, is that Nintendo is simply making a promise for possible educational inclusion, the educational software needs to actually be there for true consideration. The "My Coach" line of products, as well as Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, all available on the DS and the latter on the Wii, lends some hope that they will live up to their promise.
Each class needs a projector and laptop/computer, whether we go Smartboard or alternative interaction (Wii, clickers, etc), so that cost is constant.
Notice, also, many of these Nintendo-supported softwares are popping up on Apple products too.

My Photoshop Elements example

I used PSE to edit some raw comics that I made in Comic Life. I'm a horrible artist, but everything other than the sprites are great!
Oh, they all have a Biology leaning. Enjoy.
Yes, I did put more into this then the Photo Story. What can I say? I like comics!

Comic 1: The Endless Argument